Why Agile Software Development?

This is the common question which I hear during my agile training that why we need to shift from waterfall to agile software development. Agile Software Development enables organization to respond quickly to market needs and sustain in competitive environment. It helps to increase the agility of organization and plan quickly as market changes. Agile Software development is only possible when whole organization understand the benefits and adopt the mindset.

To answer this question, below are some major benefits, I would like to highlight.

Understand business requirement clearly

Bring business value quickly

Transparency

Accelerate Delivery

Improves Quality

Fail fast and learn fast

Each of the item has been explained in detail below.

Understand business requirement clearly

It is very important for developers to understand the customer business requirement clearly but in waterfall model it has been seen that developer and customer don’t have regular interaction and they have different view on requirement. Always, there will be some gap in understanding the requirement or sometime customer also don’t know what they want.

In agile software development, Customer and development team interact frequently which help to understand requirement clearly and fill the gap if any.

Bring Business Value quickly

There is always value addition when we release the product quickly to customer. The sooner customer start using the product, they start receiving return on investment. It helps to customer to be leader in the competitive market.

It also increase customer satisfaction as they see the progress in incremental development. Releasing quickly also reduce risk as customer provide feedback immediately on last product release which was delivered to them.

Transparency

Agile Software Development provides opportunity for clients to be involved throughout the project and have regular communication with development team. Customer have always visibility on real status of development. Changes can happen in both side ex: – Market change, requirement change, prioritization change etc. Either positive or negative changes, Customer’s product owner share with team and get the feedback.

Accelerate delivery

It has been seen in waterfall model that, there are many task having WIP status and not delivering on time. It impact on team efficiency and they unable to deliver the project on time.

Agile Software Development helps to Plan, prioritize, and deliver business value in shorter duration. It helps team to be focused on complete the development and deliver committed user stories and then start new user stories based on product owner prioritization. To accelerate delivery

Improves Quality

Adopting Agile Software development practices helps to improve the quality of Solution delivered. By producing frequent builds and conducting continuous integration & Testing in each iteration helps to find the defect quickly and help to improve the quality.

Fail fast and learn fast

In Agile Software Development Shorter Iteration gives opportunity to development team to fail early. In this way, customer and developers both discover very quickly if any functionally not working in the product. It helps to identify the challenges in positive way rather they get surprise in later stage.

In shorter iteration delivery, customer satisfaction increase and development team receive good feedback and quick wins. This is also a good motivator for team.